The redemption of Bret Easton Ellis

A decade ago, the American Psycho author was vilified. Now, he could launch a franchise.

Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one could fabricate this.

At this very moment, Lions Gate Films, the company distributing American Psycho, is in negotiations with Ellis to buy sequel rights. According to Ellis, who recounts this story in a tone of voice that suggests he's both amused and bewildered, Lions Gate executives envision a whole series of films featuring Patrick Bateman, a man who likes to dismember his victims and hook up their dead limbs to car batteries just to watch them twitch. Among the ideas already being tossed around: Patrick moves to Silicon Valley, or maybe he ends up in Hollywood. If Lions Gate gets its way, Patrick Bateman will stab, skewer, and chew his way across America.

"It's like a Pink Panther series," Ellis says, choking on a laugh. "It's insane. I am not kidding at all. I have been pressured, and they've been in negotiations with my agency, and nothing's been settled yet, but I just think things are getting out of hand, basically." Ellis insists that if he and the film company arrive at a deal, he will have nothing at all to do with the sequels. He dismisses the whole affair as the by-product of greed. Lions Gate has already recouped its investment in the film, which cost relatively little to make, from foreign-distribution sales. They can smell the blood in the water. Smells like money.

Marion Ettlinger

Is this man still the devil? Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho

"I really cannot ever imagine it happening, but the fact I've been in discussions..." Ellis pauses, as though he can't believe what he is saying. "If you had told me 10 years ago this was going to happen, I would have said, 'You're out of your fucking mind.'"

Indeed, a decade ago, it seemed as though American Psycho would never even land on bookshelves. Simon & Schuster refused to publish it; then-editor in chief Richard Snyder insisted he could not circulate Ellis' book, because "when you really have to sit down and in the privacy of your own mind read a book word by word, it's a more powerful experience. The violence has greater impact. You become the person you are reading about." He claimed he was terrified the novel would inspire others to kill. That, or he caved in to pressure from the National Organization for Women, which called for a boycott of the book and any company that would dare publish "the most misogynistic communication we have ever come across," in the words of NOW president Tammy Bruce, who, in 1990, read graphic excerpts from the then-unreleased book over a telephone hotline.

Even journalists, staunch defenders of the First Amendment until something upsets their delicate sensibilities, supported the publishing house's actions. "There are descriptions of murder and sadism so gruesome and grisly that Simon & Schuster's decision not to publish the book on the grounds of taste is understandable," wrote The New York Times' Richard Bernstein in December 1990. Spy magazine, which picked on Ellis the way schoolyard bullies terrorize weak children, serialized purloined excerpts from the novel. Time referred to the book as, quite simply, "not safe."

So how did we wind up here, with Ellis about to sell off his much-maligned child for Hollywood's fast cash? Have we fallen so far in a decade that Patrick Bateman's exploits no longer shock or sicken us? Have we become so desensitized that we no longer flinch at the notion of serial killer as hero (at least, when he is not portrayed by Anthony Hopkins)? Or have we finally wised up to the fact that Ellis' book, though crudely written and poorly edited, is indeed a rather prescient, often scabrous satire of the unfilled gluttony of the 1980s?

It's probably none of the above. And all of the above.

But most likely, none of this has to do with Bret Easton Ellis at all. He has no one to thank but director Mary Harron, who has excised the gore from his book and, somehow, found beneath the blinding, boring surface an inspiring film in which mayhem and madness may exist only in Patrick's mind. Even Ellis admits that Harron's film -- which he describes as "calm" and "cool," two adjectives never applied to his novel -- helps "clarify the themes of the book." In other words, Mary Harron has saved his book and, in the process, redeemed Bret Easton Ellis.

"If, 10 years ago, you told me a feminist mother was going to write and direct the movie, I would have said, 'Get out of here. Leave the room now. You're mocking me. You're mocking me!'" Ellis says, his voice rising in fake anger. "But this is what 10 years can do to a book. I mean, it's very strange to me. It's weird that American Psycho in many ways is mainstream now. I find that strange, and that's something that I never would have expected. But I think it's just the fact that it's been around for such a long time and a lot of people have read the book -- more than they did in 1991, '92. We're long past the point of people believing this really was a book written by the devil."